Grimoire vs Labyrinthos vs Co-Star: Which App Is Actually Built for Witches?

The honest answer, before the comparison begins

These three apps are not competing for the same user. That sounds like a hedge, but it is actually the most useful thing to know before you read any further — because the question "which one should I use?" has a more interesting answer than "this one".

Labyrinthos is a tarot and oracle learning tool. It is built around the project of learning to read the cards: structured lessons, beautiful original artwork, quiz-based reinforcement, a gamified progression that rewards consistency. If you want to learn tarot, it is one of the best tools available. It is not a practice companion. It is not a grimoire. It does not know what a sabbat is.

Co-Star is a social astrology app. It is built around the natal chart as a shared social object — something you compare with your friends, something that generates daily horoscope content calibrated to your placements. The content is human-curated rather than algorithmically generated, which gives it a texture most astrology apps lack. It is genuinely fun if you have friends on it. It is not a practice companion either. It does not have a journal. It does not do spell work. It does not know about deities.

Grimoire is a practice companion for solitary witches. It is built around the grimoire — the private, accumulated record of a craft — and everything in the app exists to support that record. Daily tarot draw. Natal chart. Deity journal. Herbology compendium. Spell builder. Sacred calendar. Shadow work space. It is not trying to teach you tarot in a gamified progression or build your social astrology graph. It is trying to give a solitary practitioner one coherent home for the work she is already doing.

A serious solitary practitioner might reasonably use all three. That is also the honest answer. But if you can only choose one, the choice depends entirely on where you are and what you need. This post is an attempt to make that clear.

What each app is for

Labyrinthos — learning the deck

Labyrinthos is the best tarot learning app available if "learning" means building a systematic understanding of the deck's structure, symbolism, and meaning through active practice. The original Labyrinthos deck is illustrated in a style that is modern without being precious, and the lesson structure moves logically from the structure of the deck through the Major Arcana, the suits, and the court cards. The quiz format — matching cards to keywords, keywords to cards, identifying reversed meanings — is the kind of active recall that actually builds memory rather than the passive reading that most tarot books involve.

Its limitations are structural rather than incidental. It is a learning environment, not a practice environment. Once you have learned the deck — once you can read a spread with confidence and the meanings have moved from memory into intuition — Labyrinthos has less to offer. There is no journal. There is no record of your readings. There is no connection to the wider practice a working witch is building. The app does not know what your natal chart says, what deities you work with, what herbs are in your apothecary. It holds one piece of the practice very well and nothing else.

Where Labyrinthos wins: Learning tarot for the first time, or consolidating a shaky foundation. The card art. The onboarding experience.

Where it falls short: Anything beyond tarot. Long-term record-keeping. The broader context of a solitary practice.

Co-Star — astrology as a social layer

Co-Star built something genuinely novel: it made natal chart astrology social. You enter your birth data, it generates a full natal chart, and then the app's real value proposition begins — you can compare your chart with friends, see your compatibility across house placements, and receive daily notifications that feel more considered than the usual sun-sign fare. The content is written by human astrologers rather than generated algorithmically, which means it sometimes achieves the odd precision that good astrological writing can manage.

The social dimension is also where Co-Star's limits become visible. It is designed for astrology as a shared conversation. It is not designed for astrology as a private working tool. The natal chart in Co-Star is presented; it is not used to calculate planetary hours, flag auspicious windows for ritual, or connect your transits to the working you are planning. The daily notifications are content consumption. They do not integrate with a practice.

Co-Star has also faced criticism — some of it fair — for the abstractness of its daily readings ("be in a room today" became a joke for a reason) and for its data practices, which are more typical of a VC-funded social app than a privacy-first tool. This is not a dealbreaker for everyone, but it is worth knowing if privacy is a priority for your practice.

Where Co-Star wins: If you have friends who use it. Natal chart as social object. The human-written content quality on good days.

Where it falls short: Privacy. No ritual tools. No journal. No integration between your chart and your working practice. The daily readings can be frustratingly vague.

Grimoire — the practice companion

Grimoire is built around a single premise: a solitary witch needs one coherent home for the work she does alone. The Daily Pulse gives the day's tarot card, moon phase, planetary hour, and solar timing each morning. The Discovery section builds a Soul Portrait from four self-knowledge tools — the Witch Path quiz, the Patron Deities quiz, the natal chart, and the numerology profile. The Codex holds the reference library: herbology, tarot, pantheon, sacred texts, correspondences. The Practice section holds the working tools: spell builder, deity journal, sacred calendar, scent magic, apothecary, shadow work.

Where Labyrinthos teaches the deck and Co-Star reads the sky, Grimoire holds everything together and connects the pieces. Your natal chart informs your daily planetary hour data. Your witch path archetype points toward your patron deities. Your apothecary cross-references your herbology library and your spell builder. The practice you are building has a single record, kept locally on your device, belonging to no one but you.

The trade-offs are also real. Grimoire does not have Labyrinthos's elegance as a tarot learning environment — if you are learning the cards for the first time, Labyrinthos will onboard you more gently. Grimoire does not have Co-Star's social dimension — it is deliberately a private practice tool, not a shared one. And Grimoire is pre-launch: it is arriving on Android in May 2026, where Labyrinthos and Co-Star are established products with years of refinement behind them.

Where Grimoire wins: Any practitioner building a serious, long-term solitary practice. Privacy-first design. The depth and integration of the reference library. Deity work. The grimoire journal itself.

Where it falls short: Not yet on iOS. Tarot learning is present but not as pedagogically structured as Labyrinthos. No social features if that matters to you.

Side-by-side comparison

	Grimoire	Labyrinthos	Co-Star
Primary purpose	Solitary practice companion	Tarot & oracle learning	Social astrology
Tarot	78-card gallery with meanings + daily draw	Full learning curriculum with original deck	Daily card, basic reference
Natal chart	Full chart, saved to Soul Portrait, used for timing	None	Full chart, social comparison
Astrology depth	Natal chart + transits + planetary hours + moon	None	Chart + daily horoscope
Journal / grimoire	Private, local-storage, 7 entry types	None	None
Deity work	Patron deity quiz + deity journal + pantheon reference	None	None
Herbology	Full compendium, planetary + elemental correspondences	None	None
Spell builder	Full ritual composition tool	None	None
Sacred calendar	Moon phases + all 8 sabbats + planetary hours	None	None
Sacred texts	Bibliotheca (Key of Solomon, Kybalion, etc.)	None	None
Shadow work	Device-only private journal	None	None
Social features	None (private by design)	Community	Central feature
Privacy	Local storage, no ads, no data mining	Standard	VC-funded, social data
Free tier	Generous — tarot, moon phase, herbology, lessons	Free with premium	Free
Premium price	From $1.99/month	From $2.99/month	Free (optional premium)
Platforms	Android May 2026 (iOS to follow)	iOS + Android	iOS + Android

Which one should you use?

If you are new to tarot and want to learn it properly: Start with Labyrinthos. Its onboarding is excellent and the card art is worth spending time with. Come back to Grimoire when you want the reference layer integrated into a broader practice.

If you are astrologically oriented and your friends are also into it: Co-Star is worth having for the social dimension. It does the shared chart experience better than anything else. Run it alongside Grimoire rather than instead of it.

If you are a solitary practitioner building a practice across multiple disciplines — tarot, astrology, herbology, deity work, journalling, spellcraft: Grimoire is the only app built for all of it in one place. The others were not designed for this use case. Grimoire was.

If privacy matters to you: Grimoire is the only one of the three built around local storage as a first principle. Your journal entries, deity records, and shadow work never leave your device. This is structural rather than a policy statement — the data is not there to be handed over or exposed. If you use your spiritual practice to process private things, this distinction matters.

The case for using more than one

A working solitary witch might reasonably run Labyrinthos for a year while she is learning the cards, then stop. She might keep Co-Star for the natal chart comparison with a close friend. She might use Grimoire as her daily practice companion from the moment she has a practice worth recording. These are not competing choices in the way that, say, two streaming services compete. They are tools for different moments in a practice.

The question worth asking is not "which app should I use?" but "what does my practice actually need right now?" Labyrinthos if it needs to understand the deck. Co-Star if it needs a shared astrological language with the people around you. Grimoire if it needs a home.

Grimoire launches on Android in May 2026. The free tier includes the daily tarot draw, moon phase tracking, the full tarot gallery, the herbology compendium, the Vault correspondence tables, beginner lessons, and a basic grimoire journal. Premium unlocks the full app from $1.99/month. Join the waitlist to be notified at launch.